During an interview on this story with radio host and Breitbart News Contributing Editor Dana Loesch, Republican Senate candidate John Brunner, who is running against Todd Akin and Sarah Steelman for the chance to face off against Democrat Claire McCaskill in the fall, was asked if Sarah Palin was out of line for previously using the word “reload” and issuing a map with cross-hairs on certain races. Brunner replied “I look at these things and you look back and you think, oh, for crying out loud. You know what happens when you go to that level? You get everybody off message and when you get people off message, we have conservatives lose. If you choose your words a little bit more carefully….” (4:37 mark)

Brunner talks about “getting back to the Constitution” as a plus for conservatives. So, he wants to go back to the Constitution, as long as we do away with that silly thing called the First Amendment to appease the anti-gun lobby, which wants to do away with the Second Amendment? To please Democrats who are fine with slurring conservatives and threatening, as President Obama said, to “bring a gun”?

This flap started when McCaskill called in the FBI over what were, for all intents and purposes, harmless comments made by an activist during a speech. A mature, rationale adult with some backbone would recognize the comments as metaphorical and nothing more than harmless political speech:

Earlier today, FBI agents dropped in on the home of St. Louis conservative Scott Boston over remarks he made about Sen. Claire McCaskill at a Tea Party Express rally in Springfield. Fortunately, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was able to break the news to him, as the information was first brought to the paper before Boston himself knew.

While speaking at a Springfield event for the Tea Party Express, Boston said of McCaskill, as quoted by the Post-Dispatch: “We have to get Claire McCaskill out. We have to kill the Claire Bear ladies and gentlemen.”

… Republican Senate hopeful John Brunner, who is aiming to defeat Steelman in August for the right to face McCaskill in November, offered a firm repudiation. “This type of rhetoric is unconscionable and I reject this kind of politics,” Brunner said in a statement. “Comments like these have no place in this U.S. Senate campaign, or any other campaign in this country, because they don’t represent American values.”

“I may disagree with the words Mr. Boston chose in his statement,” Steelman said in her own statement, “but I understand his frustration and I emphatically support his right to express his views.”

It’s not enough to simply wrest control of the Senate from the Democrats and replace them with Republicans who mouth platitudes yet lack the strength and courage to stand behind the very principles they invoke to get elected. That’s precisely what Brunner is doing here. He is tossing an activist and the Constitution under the bus for political expediency. That does not demonstrate the fortitude Republicans and conservatives will need to demonstrate in order to prevail against today’s political onslaught from the Democratic Left. Scott Boston went no further than Barack Obama has done before rhetorically; should American voters have taxpayer-funded security protect them?

That Brunner would double down with Loesch and throw Sarah Palin under the bus along with other Constitutional conservatives does not speak well for him. If this is representative of Brunner’s depth of commitment to the constitutional principles he mouths, he’ll likely be far too worried about how he’ll play on the TV talk show circuit to do stand up to the Left. Such conservatives need to be thrown out of Washington, not sent there.